An island good enough to eat

It takes a certain kind of person to look at an island of barren, heat-scorched mountains and decide that what it really needs is a crop of chestnut trees. But that’s exactly what the Genoese governor of Corsica did in 1584, when he decreed that, from then on, every farmer must plant four trees a year: a chestnut, a fig, an olive and a mulberry. Over the coming centuries, that single long-sighted decision was to transform the economy of the island — and have an equally remarkable effect on its cuisine.

What the governor had grasped was that chestnuts, in addition to being a foodstuff in their own right, can be used to make flour — a particularly fine flour at that, with a slightly smoky…